Would You Rather I Think You Are Wrong, a Fool, or a Liar?

A couple of years ago, I was traveling in a car with some friends (remember when we did that?) listening to the driver tell us about his alien encounters, paranormal abilities, and his paranoid delusions that Big Pharma possessed cures for practically every major disease from the cold to cancer but were suppressing them for fun and profit. Normally, I zone out when this kind of noise is going on, but that was tough to do on this trip. I tried though, trust me, I tried.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked, “Which is less insulting, being called wrong, a liar, or a fool?” I seriously wanted to know because I do not know the answer, even for myself, at least I don’t know the absolute answer. Liars are often out for some kind of gain, but this wasn’t that kind of situation, and fools can be educated if they want to be. Just being wrong is the human condition. So it seems to me that "wrong" or “fool” would be the better option, but admitting to either is tough on the ego. Especially when you are convinced you are extremely intelligent. I am not cursed with that delusion, at least. So, for me it’s "wrong" or “fool” over “liar.” I might have said “bullshitter” rather than “liar,” but the difference is academic. You could substitute “uninformed,” “misinformed,” “delusional,” or “easily misled” for “fool,” too. Likewise, there are lots of substitutes for "wrong" that apply, but they are no less irritating. Again, the difference is semantic rather than quantitative.

Not surprisingly, my friend did not like the question and I’m still hung out to dry as to which is the worst of the options. No, I’m not kidding. It’s a serious question, or as serious as I’m capable of being. Remember, I mostly think humans are the dumbest least sustainable animal in existence.

One of the funny aspects of this conversation/confrontation is that I’d talked this friend into reading Sagan’s A Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark a while back and he loved it. He read statements like “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.” And my friend agreed with Sagan and saw no contradiction between Sagan’s ridicule of alien invasions, magical hidden-away “cures” and technologies suppressed by an all-powerful government or corporations and his own claims to unrepeatable and unvalidated paranormal abilities and anything Sagan said to the contrary.

Another friend is absolutely unconvinced that motorcycle helmets contribute anything useful to motorcyclist safety. This is in spite of the most recent “experiment” in Florida in 2000, when the state exempted riders from required helmets. “The interrupted time series analysis (1/1994 to 12/2001) estimates a 48.6% increase in motorcycle occupant deaths the year after the law change.” Other states contributed to increasing motorcycle deaths in the same general period when Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana weakened their helmet laws. He made some pretty extravagant claims about his lifetime riding mileage, which (probably irrationally) I had to doubt because of his anti-helmet stance. Riding a motorcycle for long hours without a helmet is just not something I’ve ever witnessed in my 50-some years on a motorcycle. The helmet-less biker crowd are usually pushing their extreme limits doing a 100 miles between long bar stops, which usually results in staggering homeward, a crash, an arrest, and/or calling a friend with a pickup or trailer for a ride home. I get that, too, since you really take a sonic and physical beating on a motorcycle without some kind of head protection and a windshield isn’t even close to useful for that purpose.

Like many from my generation, math isn’t this man’s strong point. We hear words like “million” and “billion” and “trillion” tossed around by the media so much that they become familiar-seeming concepts. However, familiarity breeds not just contempt but incomprehension when it comes to numbers; specially at the really large and really small extremes. Likewise, another acquaintance is constantly barraging me with left-wing economic silliness. He admitted that his consumer math skills are so poor that he couldn’t balance a checkbook or a family budget if his life depended on it. (His wife is stuck with that responsibility.) However, with that disability firmly in hand he is convinced he is an expert on the US Fed and the World Bank’s function and the economic solutions to the world’s many complicated dysfunctions. He is really tired of my laughing while he jabbers away about pure nonsense. Again, and likewise, a Libertarian acquaintance has equally nonsensical “solutions” to problems that are so far beyond his economic, mathematical, social-system grasp that they are pure comedy and he also stopped talking to me in person because I can’t stop laughing when he kicks the mini-Koch propaganda in gear and I blurt out, “You know, your heroes were first in line for government handouts when their real estate ‘investments’ and other gambling debts blew up in 2008, right?” People in glass houses, even glass mansions, you know?

So, my question stands and I’d love to hear a response (in the comments, not in a direct email) from anyone who stumbles on this blog. Is it better to be thought simply wrong, a fool, or a liar? What does it mean about someone who picks one over the other? And why do you think one is better than the other?

The “Too Many Men” Problem

War has always been an old man’s game, using young men as pawns, cannon fodder, and the tools of the “trade.” The January 6th seditionists were great demonstrations of what happens to a culture that breeds gross excesses of unskilled, uncreative, uneducated young men and provides them with nothing to do to either burn off their unproductive but dangerous energies or the necessary self-destructive opportunities nature intended for them. If we’re not going to give them swords and spears and pointless causes for them to flail away at each other in the service of their lords and masters, they need drugs and mindless activities with which to distract themselves. Thousands of years of human evolution and near-constant war between cities, states, and regional nations either caused or was were caused by these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible. The true cause of war might be a surplus of  these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible.

Forty years ago, a friend and I made a regular pilgrimage to San Clemente, CA (Doug always called it “San Clemency,” since Nixon was still boarded-up there at the time.) to scuba dive the San Clemente reef. Weather or ocean conditions were never a limiting factor for us. If we’d made the date for Sunday on the Monday before, regardless of 10’ surf, 2” visibility (seriously), cold, wind, or rain, we’d both be there on Sunday, suited-up, spearguns and game bags in hand, ready to swim the half-mile from the beach to the reef, and dive into the crashing water for fun and adventure. Over the years we repeated this exercise, we developed our own (probably not) definition of “macho”; which, essentially, translated to “stupid.”  When we chanted “this is really macho—as we flailed against the first 100’ of surf, sand, and wind until we got beyond the surf zone where we could comfortably paddle on our backs with our BCs partially inflated like undersized Zodiacs the rest of the swim to the reef—we were really telling ourselves that “this one might be the one that kills one or both of us.” Macho.

Doug was a PADI Dive Instructor and, eventually, I became a Dive Master (an instructor’s assistant) and as certified instructors we preached the PADI religion of “dive buddies” to our dive class students: as one PADI instructor quotes, “. . . the buddy system makes every dive safer and more fun.” And more complicated. Doug and I only paid slight notice to the whole buddy concept, especially at San Clemente. With visibility that rarely exceeded 3-4’ and was usually barely an arm’s reach, there was no point in pretending that once we went under water there was any chance that we’d be buddied-up. One of the last dive trips we did together, Doug asked, “What do you think is in store for two guys like us, who Nature intended to finish off in a war before we made it to 20 or 25 years old, who have ever appearance of living way past 40, at least?”

I totally understood what he meant. When I “celebrated” my 30th birthday, I was mostly stunned that I’d lived that long. Both in my career and in my recreation and even my everyday activities, there was no reasonable expectation from anyone who knew me that I’d live to 30, let alone 40+ years-old which I was at the time when this question was popped. Nature had clearly intended for both of us to, probably, lead a small group of young men against another group of young men in bloody, hand-to-hand combat, and to die “gloriously” on a battlefield strewn with other equally destined-and-designed-to-die young men. At 40, like lots of men, we both felt that thing often called a “mid-life crisis” but we were both aware enough to know that the crisis wasn’t about anything more than having outlived our use-by-dates. No expensive car,

Our national fixation and the weird and not particularly honest “respect” we give to people who spent time in the military is a pretty accurate example of the dichotomy between who our culture pretends these people are vs who we know they are. A recent pass through Minneapolis/St. Paul reminded me of the near-constant parade of homeless (mostly) men sporting “homeless, support your troops” signs.

The Obama Administration, several states, and a few cities combined to dramatically reduce the number of homeless vets between 2010 and 2019, but in 2019 21 out of every 10,000 veterans were homeless which is about 25% higher than non-vets. A 2012-2017 study found that military vets contributed to 13.5% of all US deaths by suicide but were only 7.9% of the US adult population. Male vets were almost twice as likely to commit suicide than female vets (with Army and Marine vets leading that “charge”). In March, 2020, the VA found that veteran unemployment was greater than 13%, opposed to a 3.5% unemployment rate for the general population at the time (Trump managed to degrade the rest of the US workforce to the vets’ unemployment level by August 2020.). Three of the top ten professions in the US that exhibit high divorce rates involve military jobs. All of that negative outcome is in spite of the desperate attempts by government and society to provide a “hand up” post-military service through generous veterans benefits, special employment consideration (especially in government employment), and the leniency society gives to those “who have served.” Being in the US military is either hazardous to the rest of your life or attracts people who are deficient in the first place. The fact that “nearly 1 in 5 of the [January 6] rioters charged so far have a history of serving in the military (only about 7% of Americans in general are military veterans)” is a pretty solid indication that being a military vet is no indication of either patriotism, loyalty to the oath service people take to the US Constitution, or intelligence or even sanity. The January 6th Hee Haw Riot was one of the most underachieving herds of human beings since . .  . every Trump rally ever.

Nixon ended the draft in July of 1973 in an attempt to end the Vietnam War protests. He was too late, of course, since Congress cut off funding for the war in late-1972, forcing the US to negotiate a “peace settlement” that allowed US troops to leave in January of 1973. The end of the draft instigated 50 years of a “poverty draft” where young people with no other economic hope feel forced to join the military in the desperate hope that they might receive some vocational training and an economic leg-up. Lake of education opportunities, college debt, and the general trends in the economy that will continue to offer fewer employment to the military’s current prime candidates: the military spends “$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.”

Places like Puerto Rico and the deep South are  the Army’s and Marine’s prime recruiting territory. Puerto Rico ‘s unemployment rate is greater than 40%, and Army recruiting offices ensnare more than 4 times the number of Puerto Rican recruits than the average US-based recruiting offices. Thanks to a particularly sleezy section of the Bush “No Child Left Behind” education bill, public schools have to grant military recruiters the same access to children as do post-secondary schools and employers. Of course, the military recruiters don’t spend anywhere near as much time at private schools or high income suburban K-12 schools as they do in impoverished rural and urban schools. Kids who know they have options are less likely to give up 4 years of their life wasting away in the military. For example, “In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell.” According to a RAND report, 40-65% of JROTC programs are clustered in the generally impoverished Southeast. JROTC programs are significantly more likely to exist in schools where the majority of students are eligible for free lunch programs. Schools with JROTC programs are twice as likely to have a large black student population than those with a more typically represented black population.

Nothing about military recruiting tactics would indicate that our military is staffed with the nation’s “best and brightest.” What we do have, however, is a military that is incredibly non-representative of the general population—racially, educationally, intellectually, and politically—and a well-armed and dangerously trained sector of and from the federal and state governments that are clearly easily duped into believing fantastic and unsubstantiated conspiracy gibberish and are very likely going to be the fall of the United States of America’s government and empire.

They Are Still Deplorable and Worse

 In September of 2016, at a New York fundraiser, Hillary Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

"The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. 

"But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

 Fox and the other voter-programming media sources turned that into "She called you deplorables." And their viewers' rarely-used brains went "click" and the programming was complete. Now, whenever someone brings up some awful thing Trump or some other Russian/Republican says, the Marching Morons chant, "But 'deplorables!." 

Yesterday, October 31, 2020, Texas Republicans demonstrated just how deplorable they are. A gang of the Trump cult surrounded the Biden/Harris bus on the way to a rally and blocked the bus, preventing the rally while some other Trump brownshirts blocked traffic in New Jersy and New York. Of course TweetyPres's response was “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!” Can we try to remember that ANTIFA is a fabricated wingnut dog whistle for "anti-fascists?" It is not an acronym for anything, numbnuts. 

So, these degenerate deadbeats have not just lost faith in democracy and are demanding that we end elections and move straight to the fascist state they appear to imagine will deliver them the prosperity they believe they deserve. That worked out well for their hero Hitler and his gangsters, didn't it? The tattered remains of the United States of America are being ridiculed around the world and we're barrelling toward a half-million dead Americans, carelessly murdered by Covid-19 and an incompetent federal government misled by a President who could not care less who dies as long as he can escape responsibility for the disasters he has created; including criminal charges and likely prison.

These fascist fanboys and groupies are the intellectual and cultural equivalent of those idiot teenagers who screamed their empty brains out at the sight or thought of the Beatles. This is not a political movement with goals, ideals, and an intellectual foundation. This is a cult of stupid that appears to be infecting almost half of the country and most of the degenerating Boomer geezers. Ms. Clinton was right. These people are deplorable and un-American at the highest level. Any Republican who doesn't denounce these farm animals as the "horrible people" they are is in the boat with Trump and his culters. 

Trump, of course, is not going to bring back American industry. That ship sailed with Reagan and his "tax reforms" that allowed the hyper-rich to get rich from "unearned income" and inheritance instead of investments in manufacturing equipment and facilities. Trump is just one of the many decadent outcomes of the Reagan Revolution that moved the US from being a manufacturing nation to a banking and service economy. You don't create world class products by gold plating a toilet and calling it a "throne." A doofus who managed to go bankrupt mismanaging a casino has no hope in the world of "bringing back good jobs" for an uneducated, unskilled labor force. That ship sailed in the 80s and we'll be playing catch-up from the middle of the pack from here out. 

A day before the 2020 election, some Grand Rapids, MI Trumpers demonstrated a new low in deplorable behavior by defiling headstones in a Jewish cemetery. "The [Michigan Democratic Jewish] caucus said the vandalism occurred at Ahavas Israel Cemetery, and photos show the words 'TRUMP' and 'MAGA' painted onto the graves. These statements were painted on the night before the election, the same day President Donald Trump is holding a rally in Grand Rapids."

I guess this is another demonstration of who these people really are. If your idea of a good job would be wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon to terrorize your neighbors into submission, Trump is probably your man. If you dream of wearing a swastika on your shoulder and hunting down "brown people" to feed into der Führer's gas chambers and mass graves, Donny can probably manage that. Don't fool yourself, though. Even if you manage to end life on this earth, for a while, it won't elevate you to anything beyond deplorable.